We get a decent number of inquiries from journalism schools interested in incorporating DocumentCloud into their coursework. That’s great, it really is. If you take a look at our list of document contributors, you’ll see a nice collection of journalism schools, student reporting projects and investigative reporting institutes. We absolutely welcome journalism schools.

That said, there are a few things worth knowing before you contact us.

DocumentCloud accounts are all organization based. More often than not, the “organization” is a newsroom, but an organization can be a research institute or a policy think tank. Documents uploaded by users are publicly attributed both to the user and to the organization they’re part of. That means you’re going to want to manage accounts fairly tightly if you don’t want alumni uploading documents willy nilly.

Account management is manual. You can designate as many administrators (who can, among other things, add and remove users) for your organization as you’d like, but DocumentCloud isn’t set up to talk to your LDAP server.

It is up to each institution or project to set and enforce internal guidelines about what content appropriate. We also expect users to adhere to our terms of service which offer some guidelines on the documents we consider acceptable. Don’t miss this, either:

b. Serious violations of this agreement may result in an entire organization being banned from DocumentCloud.

Organizations are accountable for documents uploaded in their name.

Still interested? We hope so.

Before we can get you started on DocumentCloud, we need permission to list your school or institute on our list of document contributors, and confirmation that you understand that documents published through DocumentCloud will soon be accessible through a public catalog. In a newsroom this note usually comes from the editor or editorial director. In academic contexts, the appropriate person is more often a dean or director.

I’d like to get the Cronkite School at Arizona State aboard Document Cloud. I’d act as administrator and gatekeeper of access. Do you need a specific request from Dean Crhis Callahan? If so, I’ll beat up on him next week for it.

I would like to register Eastern Illinois University’s journalism program as the association for DocumentCloud. I would be the administrator for our organization. Thanks so much for considering this.
Joe